Conventional oscillating or rotating vibratory crushers available in the past have generally been formed with a rotor positively driven in eccentric fashion relative to a surrounding stator. The stator commonly has a cylindrical or more commonly a cone shaped configuration, a crushing effect being produced between the rotor and stator. Within such a crusher, the positive eccentric drive of the rotor relative to the stator introduces a number of problems. For example, very heavy mountings are necessary for the rotor and stator in order to resist the positive eccentric drive forces applied to the rotor. The positively coupled drive for the rotor tends to cause damage or plugging within the crusher when material such as metal enters betwen the motor and stator. If such metallic articles and the like are sufficiently ductile to resist crushing, their presence within the crusher may cause damage to a portion of the crusher or plug the crusher and prevent its continued operation. Uncrushable metallic objects or the like presented a more substantial problem in such prior art crushers because they in effect presented an immovable object resisting operation of the positively driven rotor. Accordingly, damage and/or plugging were even more likely in the crusher.
At the same time, such conventional crushers were found to be generally inefficient because of the need to provide the positive eccentric drive for the rotor relative to the fixed stator.
Reference is also made to another type of vibratory crusher described particularly within U.S. Pat. No. 3,079,096 entitled CRUSHING APPARATUS and issued Feb. 26, 1963 to David P. McConnell, father of tbe present inventor.
That patent disclosed a vibratory jaw type crusher wherein a pair of opposed crusher jaws were mounting on a frame for floating vibratory movement toward and away from each other, eccentric drive forces being applied to the jaws for developing synchronized vibratory movement of the jaws in order to produce powerful crushing action between the jaws with relatively low power requirements.
More particularly, the jaws were driven by respective shafts with eccentric weights arranged upon the shafts so that the jaws operated in unison and experienced gyratory or oscillatory vibrating movement upwardly and away from one another and then downwardly and toward one another. This action caused material being crushed between the jaws to move in a downward direction, thereby resulting in the desired crushing action at a suitably effective rate.
Thereafter, the present inventor developed a vibrating crusher of the same general type as the crusher of the present invention. That crusher is described within a copending reference, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 584,325 filed Feb. 28, 1984 and entitled VIBRATORY CRUSHER, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,588,137 issued May 13, 1986. Since the crusher of the above noted reference includes certain features in common with the present invention, that reference is incorporated herein as though set forth in its entirety in order to better assure a complete understanding of the present invention.
Even with the improved crushing effect provided by the incorporated reference, further improvements in such crushers have been found desirable, for example to improve crushing capacity, to reduce power requirements, to facilitate passage of crushed material through the apparatus, for achieving more uniform crushing and for facilitating maintenance and repairs, etc.